Should you happen to be walking through the North Yorkshire Moors this weekend and come upon the fishing village of Staithes and spot two erect giant blue lobsters don’t rub your eyes, they really are there. The nine foot lobsters, one coral coloured and the other a striking aquamarine are exhibits in the ‘sculpture by the sea’ exhibition in this year’s Festival of Arts and Heritage which takes place on Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th September. The galvanised and powder coated metal ‘Coronation Catch’ exhibit > Read more

Slovenia is the latest country to announce that more Brits are visiting than ever before. For the first six months of this year, visiting Brits are up by almost a quarter. Now we are their fourth biggest market after Italy, Germany and Austria. So why are we going there? Numbers would have been inflated by the Slovenia vs England UEFA Qualifying football match in Ljubljana but having new flight connections between Southend and Maribor has helped make it easier for those in East Anglia to get there. > Read more

In the summer CD-Traveller reported the interesting curious case of the dogs in Bristol where 80 sculptures of Gromit appeared all over Bristol. Designed by celebrities and well-known artists they pinpointed an art trail through the city. Now they are in one place for just a few days.

It is just a week until Gromit invades Bristol in the form of seventy giant sculptures. But why? How has the city in which the beloved character and his master, Wallace, were invented upset the plasticine dog so much that he has generated giant size clones to take over the city?

This year Bristol Zoo is 175 years old. Apart from celebrations it may also be a useful occasion to think of the changing appeal of the zoo. Originally it was designed to show us animals that most of us were unlikely ever to see. Now as travel is much easier you can take an Arctic cruise to see polar bears, go to Borneo to see orang-utans or to Kenya to see lions and giraffes. So do you still visit zoos?

With the rest of the world to explore, it’s easy to overlook what’s on your doorstep – Blighty! In the second part of our British cities series, we open our address books in Bristol, Cambridge and Southend

Some may find this hard to believe but the Banksy exhibition last year in Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery made it into the top 30 exhibitions visited anywhere in the world.
That isn’t to belittle Bristol but to show what an achievement it was. It was up against capital cities with vastly bigger populations from which to draw visitors. In fact only one other exhibition in the UK drew more visitors, one on Chinese new art which was held at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Greater London’s population is about twenty times more than that of Bristol yet the Chinese exhibition attracted only about 280 more visitors per day than the Banksy one. And because of the nature of Banksy’s work, the exhibition couldn’t be publicised in advance.